Being stuck at an airport is actually enjoyable, thanks to Hanks, Spielberg

Published 4:00 am, Friday, June 18, 2004

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TERMINAL
Viktor Navorski (TOM HANKS) must make the best of his accommodations when a coup in his homeland leaves him stranded at the airport in New York in DreamWorks Pictures� THE TERMINAL, directed by Steven Spielberg. less

TERMINAL
Viktor Navorski (TOM HANKS) must make the best of his accommodations when a coup in his homeland leaves him stranded at the airport in New York in DreamWorks Pictures� THE TERMINAL, directed by ... more

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TERMINAL
Viktor Navorski (TOM HANKS) must make the best of his accommodations when a coup in his homeland leaves him stranded at the airport in DreamWorks Pictures� THE TERMINAL.

TERMINAL
Viktor Navorski (TOM HANKS) must make the best of his accommodations when a coup in his homeland leaves him stranded at the airport in DreamWorks Pictures� THE TERMINAL.

Being stuck at an airport is actually enjoyable, thanks to Hanks, Spielberg

In "The Terminal," Steven Spielberg has made an ineffably appealing and rather sweet film about a guy who gets stuck in an airport. That's not easy. Say what you will about some flaws in the movie's overall conception, or its tendency to veer into schmaltz, which has always been Spielberg's default setting. But first take a minute to admire a filmmaker who can transform a potentially static premise into a movie that's one long succession of interesting, detailed and amusing moments.

I'm not in love with "The Terminal," but I liked every minute in it. Other films are like empty containers; this one's full. It's full of invention, full of moments, full of business, full of the nuances of human interaction, full of feeling. Perhaps it takes a picture about confinement to fully demonstrate how much Spielberg has always been about the journey, not the destination. With mediocre filmmakers, the whole movie is contained in the climax. With great filmmakers, the whole movie is happening every second.

Tom Hanks gets his best role in several years as Viktor, a visitor from a small Eastern European nation who arrives at New York's JFK airport only to find out that his passport is invalid, following a sudden coup in his country. He can't go home, but without a valid passport he can't enter the United States, either. To make matters worse, he doesn't understand English, so when his plight is explained to him, he can only nod. He's set loose in the international airport to improvise a life for himself.

Descriptions of "The Terminal" have made it sound gimmicky. What needs to be realized is that despite an undertone of whimsicality and the subtle comedy of Hanks' playing, Viktor's situation carries significant emotional weight. Certainly anyone who has ever been to a foreign country without knowing the language can immediately sympathize with Viktor's self-consciousness and near- panic every time he has to ask anyone for anything. (Likewise, Viktor's wild- eyed freak-out at seeing his country in flames on CNN without being able to understand the newscast brought me right back to my 2001 vacation, finding out about Sept. 11 on Italian television.) It's a feeling of complete dislocation and vulnerability.

Yet gradually he gets the hang of it. Think of "The Terminal" as a less somber, less unintentionally ridiculous and more visually stimulating version of Robert Zemeckis' "Cast Away," with Hanks once again figuring out how to eat, where to sleep and how to amuse himself in an inhospitable environment. Along with Spielberg, screenwriters Jeff Nathanson, Sacha Gervasi and Andrew Niccol somehow found a way to create a sense of forward motion, through what easily could have seemed like a succession of disparate incidents. The audience is even able to believe in and track the progress of Viktor's English- language immersion.

Viktor meets a lot of people. Most significantly, he meets a flight attendant, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who takes an interest in Viktor, whom she assumes to be another frequent traveler. As played by Jones, who is even more beautiful than usual here, the flight attendant is like the female fantasy from countless 1970s films -- a warm, neurotic, available, troubled woman who, above all, is unaccountably attracted to the humble hero. The romance is appealing, but it also exists on the movie's fault line, the one between truth and fable.

It's a strange thing to realize: Spielberg never adequately accounts for why Viktor must stay in that airport for months. Instead, he uses his cinematic fairy dust to make us stop asking the question. As you may have read, there's a fellow in France who has lived in de Gaulle airport for 15 years. In his case, he just refuses to leave. Spielberg eschews that possibility -- that would make Viktor a little nutty.

Instead he puts the blame on the authorities, represented in this case by Stanley Tucci, as the frazzled head of airport security. But Spielberg won't go too far with that, either, because he wants to keep everybody within the realm of cuddly.

It's something of a problem that Spielberg is uninterested in an honest examination of the very situation he presents. He's not interested in why a guy would live in an airport. Nor is he interested in why another guy would force a guy to live in an airport.

You know what Spielberg is interested in? He's interested in making "E.T. " all over again, because E.T. is precisely what Viktor turns into -- a wise, kind, benevolent alien who eventually has to go home, but in the meantime is all about sharing the love.

Well, so what? "E.T." was a good picture, too.

Anyway, someone's got to make Spielberg movies, and it might as well be Spielberg.

-- Advisory: Some mild ribald humor.

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